You will still need the source. A quick DMCA letter and webhosters have no choice but to take it down. There are back channels to avoid that, but those typically don't get the traffic. Without publicity, the project is as good as dead if the few developers that know about it, stop working on it.

If I understood correctly it uses the proprietary libraries bundled with iOS. Those can't be legally used on Android. Similarly how you can't run Windows in a virtual machine if you don't buy the license for that Windows. Except that you can't buy a license to run iOS on a non-apple device.

Could they release the product sans those libraries, have something that's legal but useless, and tell people "you're on your own for getting the libaries" which then somehow inevitably appear on torrent/pirate sites?

It'd be a similar condition to emulators intended to play commercially released games on other platforms. Hell, I've used emulators that were useless without a BIOS file from the system they were emulating, and necessitated a trip to the dark side to get that file.

Maybe if a company releases the app themselves, but I'm pretty sure it's against the apple license to use their app store that way. It's likely the iOS sdk also makes it against the license to use the app like that.

How sad that this arrives just as the courts have made APIs copyrightable. As it stands, Apple potentially has the ability to shoot this down simply because it implements some iOS apis. Since it seems to be an academic project and is not being released publicly it is probably fairly safely inside the "fair use" protection umbrella, but the decision would certainly be having a chilling effect on whether it can be more widely released and definitely whether it could be commercially released.

Imagine if you created a cloud service with private APIs that you intended for your own app's use. Then someone reverse engineers those APIs and releases tools for people to use those APIs in unauthorized software/devices. This could certainly be detrimental to your product/service.

This is more or less the situation Apple is in right now. Someone has made tools that allow people to use Apple's software libraries on unauthorized devices. It's not unreasonable for Apple to take steps to kill it. And I'm sure iOS developers will also be pushing for Apple to kill it as well.

I guess it depends on your general point of view about "intellectual property" and what the rights of people are. If you take a more libertarian view point, people should have control over the things they own and be free to benefit from the sweat of their own labor using those things. An API is not a piece of intellectual property, it is the external behavior of a system. Like facts, it is not something anybody can claim to own. Anybody should be able observe the behavior of an object and utilize it in any way they feel they can benefit from. Now obviously this is a highly simplified example and there is a lot of gray area when people start actually copying or using true intellectual property in combination with such an API, but hopefully this explains at least my point of view on it as far as the pure API usage goes.

Interesting that the game demo was so much "smoother" than scrolling in the various applications. I'm no engineer/programmer - I assume that's because the game was easier for the emulator to understand, being more OpenGL and less proprietary Apple stuff?

Their products have always had really excellent scrolling, compared with all but the highest-end Android devices.

Looking forward to seeing what else can be done with it; even if newer .app files or whatever Apple calls them can't be run on Android, I can finally have Tilt To Live (the original one) on Android - one way or another.

Not likely...Too many issues with Apple/server auth/legal/stuff. Although one of the guys who helped create iMessage left Apple and started a project called Layer which seems like a possible public alternative to iMessage (still being developed but it's promising and I'm looking forward to all the possibilities it brings)

I need this and hope it has Bluetooth support somehow. I have a guitar pedal that only uses iOS and it would be killer not to have to borrow my girlfriends phone every time I want to purchase something.

I remember there being a project like this a while back that got shut down before even an alpha was released. Maybe this is doing things differently, but I doubt apple will let them continue even of they are doing everything within the law.

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